Let's start with a simple premise… no small business owner likes to pay legal bills. It's okay to admit it… legal bills are sort of like taxes: sometimes painful, often inevitable, but hopefully you received something of value.
However, here's an ugly twist. Suppose you ended up in a dispute with a vendor or customer, you couldn't sort it out amicably, you ended up in litigation, you lost, and then… you are told that, not only do you have to pay your own lawyer, you have to pay the other party's lawyer, as well! And, to make matters worse, the other party is a large business — ten times your

I have tackled this topic before and, assuming that a generic, global warning about boilerplate in contracts was sufficient, went on to address other topics. Well, you know what they say about "assume"… psst, it has something to do with the first three letters!
We all know what "boilerplate" means, right? According to my dictionary, it's "the standardization of a legal document's structure and language." Simple.

The majority of clients for whom I act as general counsel have ploughed their way through a variety of contracts in their 20 or 30 years of running a business. They know full well the value provided and protection afforded by a written document in which responsibilities on both sides are detailed and agreed upon.
These days, however, I am finding that there is a whole new generation of business owners for whom this is news.

The Conrad Black trial provided significant newspaper fodder, with its focus on the convergence of wealth and arrogance; yet for business executives, the essential lessons for protecting their own professional integrity have been largely left untold. For as Conrad Black and his cohorts have discovered, the pursuit of ill-conceived non-compete agreements that facilitate one’s greed can be a perilous venture. And with the legal precedent established by the verdict in the Conrad Black trial, no business executive should expose themselves to a legal assault on the basis of their receipt of non-com